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This book is a collection of thirty-five texts from the first series of guest writers’ essays, written specifically for The Funambulist weblog from June 2011 to November 2012. The idea of complementing Lambert’s own texts on his blog with those written by others originated from the idea that having friends communicate with each other about their work could help develop mutual interests and provide a platform to address an audience. Thirty-nine authors of twenty-three nationalities were given the opportunity to write essays about a part of their work that might fit with the blog’s editorial line. Overall, two ‘families’ of texts emerged, collected in two distinct parts in this volume.

The first part, The Power of the Line, explores the legal, geographical and historical politics of various places of the world. The second part, Architectural Narratives, approaches architecture in a mix of things that were once called philosophy, literature and art. This dichotomy represents the blog’s editorial line and can be reconciled by the obsession of approaching architecture without care for the limits of a given discipline. This method, rather than adopting the contemporary architect’s syndrome that consists in talking about everything but being an expert in nothing, attempts to consider architecture as something embedded within (geo)political, cultural, social, historical, biological, and dromological mechanisms that widely exceed what is traditionally understood as the limits of its expertise.

TABLE OF CONTENTS //

WALKING ON A TIGHT ROPE: INTRODUCTION Léopold Lambert

ENTROPY, LAW AND FUNAMBULISM Lucy Finchett-Madock

THE CLEAR-BLURRY LINE Daniel Fernández Pascual

POST-POLITICAL ATTITUDES ON IMMIGRATION, UTOPIAS AND THE SPACE BETWEEN US Ethel Baraona Pohl & Cesar Reyes

THE MOSQUE: RELIGION, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY Michael Badu

The Funambulist Papers is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.

About the Editor

Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who successively lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai and currently resides in New York. His approach to architecture consists in a delicate articulation between theoretical research and a frank enthusiasm for design. Such an articulation has been explicated in his book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), which attempts to examine the characteristics that make architecture an inherent political weapon through global research as well as an architectural project specific to the Israeli civil and military occupation of the West Bank. He is also the author of the graphic novel, Lost in the Line. He finds his architectural inspiration from films, novels, and political philosophy books, rather than in architectural theory texts. He is currently collaborating with Madeline Gins for her Reversible Destiny Foundation (created with the late Arakawa) whose philosophical and architectural work is highly influential upon the role of architecture in relation to the human body.

The blog The Funambulist: Architectural Narratives , a daily architectural platform written and edited by Léopold Lambert, finds its name in the consideration for architecture’s representative medium, the line, and its philosophical and political power when it materializes and subjectivizes bodies. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert for example — and one comes to trace a line on it, (s)he will virtually split this same milieu into two distinct impermeable parts through its embodiment, the wall. The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line.